I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle is proposing stringent new regulations for ships using the Great Lakes, requiring them to meet much higher standards on purging their ballast tanks to prevent the importation of invasive species that have caused enormous problems throughout the region.
Gov. Jim Doyle’s proposed permit program would require all ocean-going vessels that discharge ballast water at Wisconsin ports to greatly step up their removal of invasive species within the next three years. Included in Doyle’s 2009-11 budget, the program would be operated by the Department of Natural Resources…
Under Doyle’s proposal, Wisconsin would require all ocean-going vessels by 2012 to cleanse their ballast water 100 times more stringently than a proposed international standard. By 2013, all newly constructed ships that dock at Wisconsin ports would need to cleanse their ballast water 1,000 times more stringently than the international standard. This regulation also will go into effect in 2013 in New York and Pennsylvania. None of Wisconsin’s proposed new standards would be required of “lakers,” the ships that only travel the waters of the Great Lakes.
The problem of invasive species brought in via ship’s ballast is costing the Great Lake states billions of dollars a years, killing native species and disrupting the food chain. These new restrictions would be more stringent than federal regulations, but Michigan may benefit as well because ships that dock in both states would have to comply with the most cumbersome regulations.
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